Indiana University (IU) has chosen Anaplan to transform its financial and budget planning processes. The initiative aims to unify budgeting, forecasting and reporting activities within a single environment capable of supporting the management of a $4.5 billion operating budget spread across nine campuses.
Prior to this project, the institution relied on five separate applications to manage its financial operations. This fragmented systems landscape required significant manual work, particularly to track salary changes and positions for more than 23,000 employees. Teams also had to contend with inconsistent reporting practices across campuses, limiting overall visibility and the ability to produce consistent financial forecasts.
To address these challenges, Indiana University selected Anaplan’s cloud platform to create a single source of data for financial planning, workforce management and multi-year projections. The solution will also connect several legacy ERP systems still in use across the university, enabling a more integrated and agile approach to budget management.
According to Brett Dunn, Associate Vice President for Budget and Planning at Indiana University, this transformation should enable teams to devote more time to strategic analysis rather than manual data entry. The university intends in particular to strengthen its financial modeling capabilities, assess the impact of funding changes more effectively and gain better visibility into its long-term outlook.
The project will be structured around three main areas.
The first concerns modernizing the budget development process by automating salary increases and position management.
The second aims to standardize financial reporting through real-time dashboards and detailed analyses accessible to all campuses.
Finally, the third area will focus on integrating multi-year financial forecasts, including modeling tuition fee revenues and analyzing various financial scenarios.
For Anaplan, this collaboration illustrates the growing interest among higher education institutions in unified planning platforms capable of centralizing financial, operational and HR data. The objective is to provide decision-makers with a more accurate view of their operations and strengthen their ability to manage transformation in an ever-changing economic environment.
With this project, Indiana University is taking another step toward modernizing its financial management and confirming the growing role of EPM and intelligent planning solutions in the higher education sector.
source: Anaplan
